Three Rothkos

Abstract

AbstractWhat makes the work of the American Abstract Expressionist, Mark Rothko, great? Critics and the galleries of the world which hold his paintings, especially those he painted in his typical style of vertically arranged blocks of colour after the critical year 1949, often present his work using terms such as ‘ethereal’, ‘spiritual’, ‘luminous’, ‘mystical’, ‘sublime’. But this discourse about Rothko appears at odds with Rothko's own way of talking about his paintings, which he looked at as ‘dramas’ whose subject was ‘the basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on’. The article proposes that the mature paintings share a principle of organization, a syntax, which allows the expression of specific dramas of feeling in each painting. First, I suggest that the separate blocks of colour are to be read vertically, from top to bottom. Second, each block of colour is made up of multiple fine layers of paint of different colours. I argue that Rothko exploits the layering to enact a drama of feeling in each panel. I test out this argument by offering readings of three characteristic works of Rothko, and relate the discussion to Jaffe's (2016) discussion of indexical fields.